This invention pertains to the field of market research.
Survey research has become an integral part of modem life. Marketers, politicians, sociologists and others design, field, and analyze the results of surveys to improve their decision-making. Despite the importance of survey research to the nation's economy and to administration of large organizations, for the most part the art of survey research is practiced as it was half a century ago. Where improvements have been made, they have been in the areas of 1) word processing technology, 2) data collection technology, such as CATI (Computer Aided Telephone Interviewing), IVR (Interactive Voice Response), optical survey scanning software, and web-based survey software, 3) data tabulation technology, such as Quanvert, WinCross™, and SPSS (R) tables, and 4) presentation technology, such as Microsoft PowerPoint (R) or Harvard Graphics (R), as well as computer projectors.
Each of these technological advances has increased either 1) the speed with which changes can be made to documents, such as questionnaires or reports in the cases of word processing and presentation technologies, 2) the accuracy and consistency of the data collected, in the case of data collection technology, or 3) the depth of analysis which can be conducted, in the case data tabulation technology.
While each of these advances has greatly improved the utility of survey research, they were developed independently, at a time when human labor was less costly and there was not such a scarcity of trained market researchers, relative to demand, as there is today. Additionally, the ability of software to be programmed to mimic repetitive human-decision making has not been made use of for the most ordinary market research tasks.
The result is a research industry dependent on the implicit knowledge of analysts to properly carry out market research studies. In practice, the intricacies of a proper study design are frequently forgotten, and then recalled again at the last minute, resulting in repeated errors of omission and inconsistency. The present invention standardizes and rationalizes the seemingly unconnected pieces of the market research process and warehouses them into one all-inclusive framework and provides the tools to easily access and transform those pieces into readable market research reports.
Recent interest in the internet has resulted in a plethora of web-based survey tools which attempt to embrace the whole of the study process for online surveys, however these programs have been designed by web-based programmers, rather than market researchers, resulting in a multitude of products which either: a) are ignorant of market researchers' actual needs (for example, none of the stand-alone end-to-end web products currently on the market offer the ability to make wave-to-wave comparisons of data-the bread and butter of the market research industry, known as tracking studies; none allow cross tabulation by multiple banner points or the ability to filter question bases, also fundamentals in the field of market research; nor do these products allow researchers who outsource the field phase of research to benefit from their programs, even though it is the modus operendi for Fortune 2000 research departments and independent consultants), b) are tied to one field methodology, such as phone or internet, and require researchers to switch to a different software platform in order to conduct research through a different field channel, c) do not fully perform the functions they advertise (many advertise reporting capabilities, but data tabulation is all that is offered), d) are incompatible with data sources and formats commonly used in market research, e) assume perfect collection of data in every study (which is such a rare case that research firms actually employ entire departments, usually known as the data consistency department, to correct errors of omission, abandoned question branches and the like, or f) are custom-designed for a single, large-scale study and are thus not portable to new studies.
The result is that today the field of market research has dropped behind other industries in relation to the level of automation found in the processes used. This lack of automation falls into two areas: 1) not reusing data already input into a computer, due to incompatibility between market research programs used in different phases of the study process, and 2) the assumption that many processes, which follow clear heuristics, must be performed by humans.
This first area contrasts sharply with fields such as engineering, where CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) are heavily employed, allowing the same drawings created by architects to be used and modified by manufacturing plants without having to reprogram designs from scratch. On the contrary, the field of market research still involves reprogramming from the ground up at several points in the research process. To provide a context to understand the current invention, I outline here four major times that the data are re-entered for a market research survey, although the number is often greater in practice.
The first time the data for a market research survey are entered is when the questionnaire is originally designed by an analyst. This is typically done by typing questions into a word-processing program template, often borrowing wording of some questions from previous questionnaires.
The second time the data for a market research survey are entered is when the word-processed questionnaire is programmed into a format that can be fielded. Currently this most commonly means programming for being: 1) fielded over the telephone using CATI, 2) fielded by mail using a specially printed and typeset form which can be scanned, 3) fielded over the internet, using HTML forms and CGI scripts to collect the data, or 4) fielded using IVR by programming a computer script and recording an actor's voice reading the questions.
The third time the data for a market research survey are entered is when the survey data are exported into a database. Despite the fact that the surveys were already held in a database of some sort for fielding, the data are typically exported into an ASCII, MS Excel (R), or SPSS format without any data labels. This means that an analyst must type the question labels and response category labels into a data tabulation program, such as SPSS or WinCross. Many patched-together approaches have been used by individual data tabulation programmers to reduce the amount of rework required. These approaches generally involve cutting and pasting question text from either the CATI script or the word-processed questionnaire into a data tabulation program. The CATI programs InfoZeroUn and Quantum, do allow the CATI scripts to be automatically output in an SPSS format with labels, requiring only about one hour of work. The drawback to drawing labels from CATI scripts is that they are usually both overly long and incomplete for the purposes of data tables, because they use the complete question text as a label, which is generally too long for the purposes of tabulation and the text length limits imposed by tabbing programs. As the match between the need for the data tables and the CATI script is poor, this actually results in a data analysis specialist returning to the data tabulation program to retype the majority of question and response category labels by hand.
The fourth time the data for a market research survey are entered is when the market research report itself is written. The summary results, usually known as the detailed or general findings are simply prose, tables, and charts, which explain the information contained within the data tables to one who is not trained in reading data tables. This particular step, the fourth step in this enumeration, actually encapsulates multiple additional re-entries of the data: one time for any charts, one time for any special tables, and one time for the text of the summary results.
Even though clear heuristics exist in market research, few have been automated. This accounts for the major reason customized automation processes for market research reporting have not been expanded from large-scale, fixed format studies to the custom research market. Two major examples of decisions postponed by analysts for a lack of data are: 1) banner point definitions for data tables, and 2) how to best break up response categories to statistically test for reporting purposes. For the first type of decision, analysts currently wait until a complete dataset is received to apply their heuristics to the data to see if there will be large enough sample groups against which to run statistical tests. If the sample groups are too small, they eliminate that pair of banner points. For the second type of decision, an analyst will manually type in each paired combination of proportions within a question into a statistical testing program until a statistically significant difference is found. This can take an hour or more per question, and often results in no new statistically significant finding. Automating this step is of great benefit to analysts.
Statistical testing capabilities, needed by market researchers, are rarely found outside of specialized data tabulation programs, such as Quantum or WinCross and none of the programs currently on the market combine margins of error to statistically test rows of categorical proportions against each other. All use the Chi-Squared test instead, which is of little use in product and concept tests, where differences in the performance of an assortment of various brands is often sought.
Several problems are inherent in the current system of entry and re-entry of the data and postponement of study decisions due to a lack of complete data. These are the:    complexity and error prone nature of the systems needed to manage the process (e.g., manual updates to the original questionnaire, data tabulation plans (or tab plans), table syntax, data tables, written reports, demands to mentally track the inter-related nature of these changes to other parts of the research process, and frequent data consistency checking from one stage of the market research process to another), including most especially the error of improperly updating skip-patterns, resulting in incorrect question-branching, a costly mistake which can result in re-fielding portions of a survey, and similar types of errors in data tabulation where abandoned branches of a CATI or web-based questionnaire, or data-entry mistakes, lead to respondents reporting answers for questions they should not have been asked);    difficulty in locating and working with the latest versions of interrelated study documents and data sets throughout the study steps (this lack of consistency results in much reworking of data sets and final documents when errors are inevitably discovered);    difficulty for analysts to understand what is required for a survey, as all of the study elements must be generated from a mental map, rather than being aided by an all inclusive template,    a lack of an efficient mechanism, in current market research methodologies, to maintain consistent labels, terms, and data definitions across the various computer applications used for market research;    a failure to recognize, appreciate and enable the dependencies between data and documents throughout the study steps, this is currently done through the mental cataloging and cross-indexing of a study's details, a complex matrix known only intrinsically by the analysts who must maintain the consistency of the questionnaires with the CATI script along with the data tabulation script, the summary results and the findings;    slowness of a process, during the study phases, to handle situations where data definition changes force a series of related changes in the different, independent computer applications used for market research.
The current invention greatly reduces these sorts of problems by using a database design which collects, stores, organizes, processes and makes easily accessible, all the data elements entered during the market research survey process, from questionnaire development to data reporting by using a rule-driven artificial intelligence program to draft the market research report in prose language.
Heretofore, a limited number of patents and publications have disclosed certain aspects of market research design and analysis systems, the relevant portions of which may be briefly summarized as follows:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,006,737 to Cherry and Isaac Raymond, Feb. 8, 1977, discloses a heart monitoring device which recorded, summarized and reported sampled heart data in printed form. However, this is not a market research study design or analysis tool. Moreover, Cherry and Raymond's invention makes no attempt to translate the data from raw numbers into syntactically correct prose sentences.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,839,822 to Dormond, et al., Jun. 13, 1989, discloses an expert diagnosis system for suggesting medical treatments for physical trauma. The invention of Dormond, et al. has in common with the present invention a reliance upon the body of knowledge known as AI or artificial intelligence. Apart from this commonality, the Dormond, et al. invention varies from the present invention in that, while it employs complex heuristics to determine potential treatments, its reporting is little more than a mail merge of pre-typed paragraphs corresponding to tables of potential diagnoses. Unlike the present invention, it does not dynamically create prose syntax from a combination of data elements nor does it use statistical tests to translate data tables into newly written prose.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,504 to Tripathi, et al., Nov. 3, 1998, discloses a data table formatting system, which allows manipulation of the color, font size, and border line layout for data tables. This invention lacks any market research study design aspects. Although called a ‘report’ generator, the actual output is simply what is known as data tables in the context of the current invention. Again, no attempt is made to translate the data from raw numbers and labels into syntactically correct prose sentences.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,189,029 to Fuerst, issued Feb. 13, 2001, discloses a web survey tool builder and result compiler, which allows questionnaire design, fielding, and data tabulation. However, Fuerst's invention does not allow the analyst to use any of the other market research methodologies available (such as mail surveys, telephone surveys, in-person mall-intercepts, or interactive voice response) nor does it provide a prose report summarizing the statistically significant findings from the data tables.
The first two of the aforementioned patents are for medical diagnosis equipment which, is used to determine which of a series of diagnoses to offer. However the phraseology of these reports is set in a template, and the back-end database design and report design had no applicability to market research. These reports tend to print out on one page and do not read in grammatically correct language, whereas the current invention uses simple artificial intelligence heuristics to craft a lengthy research report phrase-by-phrase, in idiomatic prose language.
The present invention is based upon other prior art, including: relational databases, word processing programs, spread sheet programs, presentation software (such as Harvard Graphics), and commonly known statistical formulas (such as Student's T-statistic, the z-test of means and proportions, the Chi-Squared distribution and their applications, such as CHAID). This prior art also includes the following Microsoft Corporation programs: Access, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visual Basic. Also included are software programming and text mark-up languages: BASIC, HTML, Perl; and products of the following companies: Sawtooth Ci3 CATI software, Survey Said, Survey Tracker, and Raosoft.
This prior art also includes the following books: Statistics for Business and Economics, 6th Edition McClave, James T. and P. George Benson, Published by Dellen-MacMillan, 1994; Marketing Research Methodological Foundations, Sixth Edition, Gilbert A. Churchill, Jr., The Dryden Press, 1995.
The program is designed for market research analysts familiar with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and SPSS, three of the most commonly used applications in the field of market research.